How to Build the Right Content Marketing Strategy for SEO&nbspGrowth

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Delivering content that best serves the needs of users is certainly top-of-mind for many SEOs since the Hummingbird algorithm update and subsequent buzz around RankBrain. It sounds easy enough in theory, but what does that actually mean in practice? Many SEOs believe that they're already doing this by driving their content strategy by virtue of keyword research alone.

The problem with solely using keywords to drive your content strategy is that not all of your audience’s content needs are captured in search. Ask your nearest customer service representative what questions they answer every day; I can guarantee that you won’t find all of those questions with search volume in a keyword research tool.

Keyword research can also tempt you to develop content that your brand really shouldn’t be creating because you don’t have anything unique to say about it. Sure, you could end up increasing organic traffic, but are those going to be converting customers?

Moving away from a keyword-first-driven content strategy and into an audience-centric one will put you in a better place for creating SEO content that converts. Don’t get me wrong — there's still an important place for keyword research. But it belongs later in the process, after you've performed a deep dive into your audience and your own brand expertise.

This is an approach that the best content marketers excel at. And it’s something that SEOs can utilize, too, as they strive to provide more relevant and higher-quality content for your target audiences.

How is an audience-focused content strategy different from a keyword-focused content strategy?

A content marketing strategy starts with the target audience and dives deeper into understanding your brand’s expertise and unique value proposition. Keyword research is great at uncovering how people talk about topics relevant to your brand, but it is limiting when it comes to audience understanding.

Think about one of your prospective customer’s journey to conversion. Is search the only channel they utilize to get information? If you are collecting lead information or serving up remarketing ads, hopefully not. So, why should your audience understanding be limited to keyword research?

A content strategy is a holistic plan that tackles questions like:

Who is my audience?

What are their pain points and needs?

What types of content do these people want to consume?

Where are they currently having conversations (online or offline)

What unique expertise does our brand offer?

How can we match our expertise to our audience’s needs?

Finding your unique content angle

The key to connecting with your audience is to develop your unique content angle that finds intersections between what your brand’s expertise is in and your audience’s pain points. The Content Marketing Institute refers to this as a "content tilt" because it involves taking a larger topic and tilting it in your own way. Defining your brand’s expertise can be more difficult than it appears on the surface.

It isn’t uncommon for brands to say their product is what makes them unique, but if there is a competitor out there with the same general product, it’s not unique. What makes your organization different from competitors?

Here's an example

When I worked for Kaplan Financial Education, a professional licensing and exam prep provider brand under Kaplan Professional, finding our tilt was a real challenge. Kaplan Financial Education has a lot of product lines all within financial services, but the audience for each is different. We needed a tilt that worked for the entire Career Corner content hub we were creating. What we realized is that our core audience all has a big pain point in common: entering the financial services industry either through insurance or securities (selling stocks and bonds) has low barriers to entry and high turnover. Everyone entering that job market needs to know how to not only pass their licensing exam(s), but also be successful as professionals too, both in the early years and also in the years to come.

Kaplan Financial Education’s biggest content competitors create very factual content — they're websites like Investopedia, Wikipedia, and governing bodies like FINRA and state government departments. But Kaplan Financial Education has something going for it that its competitors do not: a huge network of students. There are other licensing exam prep providers that compete with Kaplan Financial Education, but none that cover the same breadth of exams and continuing education. It's the only brand in that industry that provides licensing education as individuals progress through their financial careers. "From hire to retire," as the marketers say.

We made our content tone more conversational and solicited input from our huge student and instructor network to help new professionals be more successful. We also used their quotes and insights to drive content creation and make it more relatable and personalized. All of our content tied back to helping financial professionals be successful — either as they're getting licensed or beyond — and rather than simply telling people what to do, we leveraged content to allow our current students and instructors to teach our prospective students.

You may be thinking... so I can only write content that fits in this tilt? Isn’t that limiting?

As SEOs, it can be really hard to let go of some keyword opportunities that exist if they don’t fit the content strategy. And it’s true that there are probably some keywords out there you could create content for and increase your organic traffic. But if they don’t fit with your target audience’s needs and your brand’s expertise, will it be the kind of traffic that's going to convert? Likely not. Certainly not enough to spend resources on content creation and to distract yourself from your larger strategy objective.

How to build your content strategy

1. Set your goals.

Start at the end. What is you are ultimately trying to accomplish? Do you want to increase leads by a certain percentage? Do you want to drive a certain number increase in sales? Are you trying to drive subscribers to a newsletter? Document these goals first. This will help you figure out what type of content you want to create and what the calls-to-action should be.

If you're a business like Kaplan and leads are your ultimate goal, a proven strategy is to create ungated content that provides good insights, but leaves room for a deeper dive. Have your calls-to-action point to a gated piece of content requiring some form of contact information that goes into more depth.

A business like a car dealership is going to have a primary goal of getting people into their dealership to buy a car. Their content doesn’t necessarily need to be gated, but it should have a local spin and speak to common questions people have about the car buying process, as well as show the human elements that make the dealership unique to establish trust and show how customers will be treated. Trust is especially important in that industry because they have to combat the used car salesman stereotype.

2. Identify your primary audience and their pain points.

The next step is to identify who you're targeting with your content. There are a lot of people at your disposal to help you with this part of the process. Within your organization, consider talking to these teams:

Customer Service

Sales

Technical Support

Product Management

Product Marketing

Social Media Marketing

These are often the people who interact the most with customers. Find out what your audience is struggling with and what content could be created to help answer their questions. You can also do some of this research on your own by searching forums and social media. Subreddits within Reddit related to your topic can be a goldmine. Other times there are active, related groups on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. If you’ve ever been to the MozCon Facebook group, you know how much content could be created answering common questions people have related to SEO.

3. Determine your brand’s unique expertise.

Again, dig deeper and figure out what makes your brand truly unique. It likely isn’t the product itself. Think about who your subject matter experts are and how they contribute to the organization. Think about how your products are developed.

Even expertise that may seem boring on the surface can be extremely valuable. I’ve seen Marcus Sheridan speak a couple of times and he has one of the most compelling success stories I’ve ever heard about not being afraid to get too niche with expertise. He had a struggling swimming pool installation business until he started blogging. He knew his expertise was in pools — buying fiberglass pools, specifically. He answered every question he could think of related to that buying process and became the world thought leader on fiberglass pools. Is it a glamorous topic? No. But, it’s helpful to the exact audience he wanted to reach. There aren’t hundreds of thousands of people searching for fiberglass pool information online, but the ones that are searching are the ones he wanted to capture. And he did.

4. Figure out your content tilt.

Now put your answers for #2 and #3 together and figure out what your unique content angle will look like.

5. Develop a list of potential content topics based on your content tilt.

It’s time to brainstorm topics. Now that you know your content tilt, it’s a lot easier to come up with topics your brand should be creating content about. Plus, they’re topics you know your audience cares about! This is a good step to get other people involved from around your organization, from departments like sales, product management, and customer service. Just make sure your content tilt is clear to them prior to the brainstorm to ensure you don’t get off-course.

6. Conduct keyword research.

Now that you’ve got a list of good content topics, it’s time to really dive into long-tail keyword research and figure out the best keyword targets around the topics.

There are plenty of good tools out there to help you with this. Here are a few of my go-tos:

Moz Keyword Explorer (freemium): If you have it, it’s a great tool for uncovering keywords as questions, looking at the keyword competitive landscape, and finding other related keywords to your topic.

Keywordtool.io (free): One of the only keyword discovery tools out there that will give you keyword research by search engine. If you are looking for YouTube or App Store keywords, for instance, this is a great idea generation tool.

Ubersuggest.io (free): Type in one keyword and Ubersuggest will give you a plethora of other ideas organized in a list alphabetically or in a word cloud.

7. Create an editorial calendar.

Based on your keyword research findings, develop an editorial calendar for your content. Make sure to include what your keyword target(s) are so if you have someone else developing the content, they know what is important to include in it.

8. Determine how to measure success.

Once you know what content you're going to create, you’ll need to figure out how you'll measure success. Continuing on with the Kaplan example, lead generation was our focus. So, we focused our efforts on measuring leads to our gated content and conversions of those leads to sales over a certain time period. We also measured organic entrances to our ungated content. If our organic entrances were growing (or not growing) disproportionate to our leads, then we’d take deeper dives into what individual pieces of content were converting well and what pieces were not, then make tweaks accordingly.

9. Create content!

Now that all the pieces are there, it’s time to do the creation work. This is the fun part! With your content tilt in mind and your keyword research completed, gather the information or research you need and outline what you want the content to look like.

Take this straightforward article called How to Get Your Series 7 License as an example. To become a registered representative (stockbroker), you have to pass this exam. The primary keyword target here is: Series 7 license. It’s an incredibly competitive keyword with between 2.9K–4.3K monthly searches, according to the Keyword Explorer tool. Other important semantically related keywords include: how to get the Series 7 license, Series 7 license requirements, Series 7 Exam, General Securities Registered Representative license, and Series 7 license pass rate.

Based on our content tilt and competitive landscape for the primary keyword, it made the most sense to make this into a how-to article explaining the process in non-jargon terms to someone just starting in the industry. We perfectly exact-match each keyword target, but the topics are covered well enough for us to rank on the front page for all but one of them. Plus, we won the Google Answer Box for "how to get your Series 7 license." We also positioned ourselves well for anticipated future searches around a new licensing component called the SIE exam and how it’ll change the licensing process.

Once you've created your content and launched it, like with any SEO work, you will have a lag before you see any results. Be sure to build a report or dashboard based on your content goals so you can keep track of the performance of your content on a regular basis. If you find that the growth isn’t there after several months, it is a good idea to go back through the content strategy and assess whether you’ve got your tilt right. Borrowing from Joe Pulizzi, ask yourself: "What if our content disappeared? Would it leave a gap in the marketplace?" If the answer is no, then it’s definitely time to revisit your tilt. It’s the toughest piece to get right, but once you do, the results will follow.

If you're interested in more discussion on content marketing and SEO, check out the newest MozPod podcast. Episode 8, SEO & Content Strategy:

Alli is a content-focused SEO Manager at Two Octobers, a digital marketing agency in Denver. Previously, she generated over $1 million in sales from leads using this audience-driven content marketing approach for Kaplan Financial Education. She was named a 2017 Content Marketing Award finalist from the Content Marketing Institute for Highest Conversion Response from a Content Program.

It goes very well with Rand Fishkin's last white board Friday hwere he was looking at Google search results to understand user intent. I like to go to Quora and Reddit to understand user's search intent, in the same way as you have shown with the pool niche. The thing is that Quora and Reddit users gather into the same overall niche.

I would love to gain insights into decision maker's minds to adapt my content to reach them! Anybody has developped techniques to do that?

Thanks for the kind feedback, Jean-Christophe! There are a lot of ways to gain insights into your prospective customers' mind sets. If you have a sales and or customer service team, they talk to customers every day and are a great resource for understanding what goes into their decisions. If not, surveys can be really effective. I have actually gone to a conference for financial advisors to listen in on what their areas of concern are in their industry so I could better write to them. I try to think like a journalist - how would they get their information? Hope that helps!

Determine your brand's unique expertise is something awesome but sooo scary at the same time.

When your business is relatevely brand new is so scary to be too niche with expertise.

Not being sure that your expertise is what people is looking for. For example you are an expert in some area and you focus your content on that and later you see that nobody are interested in that exact expertise.

So do you think it would be better implementing this after some time, when you are sure that what you are expert in is also interesting to people?

Finding the right niche is a big market research challenge, and too much market research with low budgets seems like procrastination sometimes. I rather take this time to create content.

This technique hasn't been proven yet, but I like to look at the "realisations" section of competitors that are bigger than me. They are usually proud of their biggest success. This way I can see a correlation between big spenders. Then I look at linkedin profiles of the decision makers of these businesses to see what kind of pages they like.

Thanks for the feedback! I see where you are coming from and my advice to you would be to start your strategy with a content tilt. It sounds like you were trying to create content before you got through the whole strategic process. I would first concentrate on identifying your own business expertise and what makes you unique in the marketplace and then determining what the pain points would be for someone who needs what you do. Rather than narrowing down an audience group or a persona like artists, think more broadly about what road blocks someone would hit that would cause them to need to pay for your services. That's where you should start with your topic list and keyword research. Hope that helps!

Nowadays things like Rank Brain and Semantic search are increasing in importance. Therefore if we integrate related topics on the web page it will be better.

As you rightly said we have to make sure that "audience’s content needs are captured in search"

So, I would suggest that tools like lsigraph should be used to uncover related terms. We have also to take a look at Google's related searches at the bottom of the page and the questions displayed within search results. There are tools like answer the public which generate questions based on your seed keyword.

I have noticed that many times we will find the same page appearing in many of Google's related searches also.

To research popular topics we can use buzzsumo and then try to write something which is better than that and also add related topics.

Accidentally came across this post, being an ACCA student, am a big fan of Kaplan financial services. It’s true that they are the only who provide licensing education as individuals progress through their financial careers. "From hire to retire,"

Now I know why they rock among their strong competitors, the entire credit to content marketing strategy.

Audience focused content strategy is far different from keyword focused content strategy. The holistic plan given to strategise content is of much help. Most of us, as content marketers, go for a toss here when it comes to prepare content based on buyer persona and buyer journey. This post provides good guidelines on these lines.

The preliminary study of what content should be published on the blog is essential to achieve quality traffic. In our case, we analyze the keywords that have traffic in our sector, as well as investigate which are the contents that are working for the competition.

Reading this article i understand one thing that what content should be published on the blog is very important thing to know that to achieve quality traffic. by using good key words only it will brig traffic to site

Brilliant post. I agree with you. Proper content marketing strategy is really essential for strong SEO. I think unique, quality, relevant, on-topic, simple format and clear representation for right audience is the key element for content to make good landing page. Thank you.

Just need to know, If in past I had published blog or content for my site "Which had given my website a great value that time, but now have not much impression" Is it good to revamp them with today's "Keywords" + "Customer" oriented content or to produce all together new content?

Hi Ankit, I guess it depends on how aligned your old content is with your audience. If, from their perspective, your content doesn't serve their informational needs, I would start over. If it's still usable with some tweaks, that's easier. I suspect if your content was doing well and isn't currently, it's probably because it was too keyword-focused and not focused enough on being helpful to your target audience. Hope that helps!

I like this post, learn many thing such as : Targeting the right audience before doing the SEO. But one thing would like to ask, if you are doing SEO for newbie website, how would you determine the Target audience , also how to plane the content strategy. Plz Suggest.!

I would start with the 9 steps in this article. Think about what your website goals are first and work from there. What is your brand? What makes you unique? Who needs your product and why? What are their content needs and pain points? Hope that helps!

This is exactly post, what I am looking fort. some more things to add:

Nowadays things like Rank Brain and Semantic search are increasing in importance. Therefore if we integrate related topics on the web page it will be better.

As you rightly said we have to make sure that "audience’s content needs are captured in search"

So, I would suggest that tools like lsigraph should be used to uncover related terms. We have also to take a look at Google's related searches at the bottom of the page and the questions displayed within search results. There are tools like answer the public which generate questions based on your seed keyword.

I have noticed that many times we will find the same page appearing in many of Google's related searches also.

To research popular topics we can use buzzsumo and then try to write something which is better than that and also add related topics.

Thanks for the good article, Alli. Really helpful! I think both is important: to do your keyword research (also research your competitors) and to understand your target audience. I feel like you need some kind of a mixture between the two. In addition I think it’s important to not solely cover one specific topic but to also include related topics as semantic search increases. (Maybe also use the suggestions at the bottom of the page in google when you type in certain keywords).

Totally agreed. The semantic search suggestions at the bottom of the SERPs are a great resource for those. Any tool that also allows you to group keywords like the Moz Keyword Explorer can also help with that. Thanks for the feedback!

Good question - I think both are important, but I agree with Sergio that quality content leads to quality link building. If you have bad content, building links is going to be nearly impossible. If you have great content, your link building campaign will be more successful.

We must thoroughly investigate the keywords for which we are interested in being well positioned and above all find the balance between content creation and target audience to which we want to address.

Fantastic post! And something I've been meaning to write about. Yes keyword research is absolutely important but often times content marketers drive straight into it with no work done before hand. Talking to clients, customers and staff on the ground to understand the audience first — this should come first.

We have a client in such a complex (and expensive) industry - that there are thousands of questions that need to be answered before moving to the next step. Having the luxury of knowing all the pain points, we have been able to create guides and Q&A's that help kickstart the process. With all the content out there, sometimes you just want something that spells it out for you, and all in one spot.

Trail of your final content is also necessary I mean before launching it show some people so that you can identified if there is any fault. By showing it to some people, you will definitely get a feedback if it is good or bad.

I'm not sure that a keyword length ever is too limiting in a piece of content. Doing keyword research using one of the tools mentioned or another and finding long-tail keywords that have search volume is the best way to ensure you are targeting a keyword that people are searching for.